A Mom of an Autistic Son Worries Because of H.R. 610 and Secretary DeVos

My son is awesome. He’s funny and smart, and has good friends. He plays football with some of them at recess, and 10 of them just came to his birthday party a few weeks ago. He is in the 4th grade, and while he complains constantly about having to do school work, he gets off the school bus most days with a huge smile on his face and stories to tell of his day. He’s happy. He’s thriving.

I’m so scared that all that is about to be taken away from us. He has autism, and the new bill H.R. 610 that was recently proposed in Congress, that is backed by people like our new Secretary of Education DeVos, threatens the support system that makes my son’s experience possible.

My son’s school is a wonderful, warm, inclusive environment — and it is a public school. He has an in-classroom aid who helps him stay focused on his work, which is a struggle for him. He gets speech and occupational therapy services, and is part of social skills groups and gets extra help with reading. The special educators there are intelligent, dedicated, incredibly well-trained professionals who obviously take great pride and joy in working with my son.

If this bill passes, would they still have their jobs? The bill eliminates the requirement to educate children like mine, and moves the funding for special education services to a general pool available for “school choice” vouchers. Would these incredible people still be able to do their jobs? Would the resources they use today be stripped from them? Is my son about to lose the support that has caused him to thrive? These are questions that are now keeping me up at night.

You might tell me to look on the bright side — that I would be able to get some funding to send my son to private school, that “specializes” in kids like him.

While I know such a sentiment would be well-meant, it rings hollow to me. You see, my son was in “specialized” environments during his early intervention days and early school years. They were great — for a time.

My son progressed to the point where those specialized environments actually started to hold him back. He didn’t need the visual schedules, or the special motor breaks, or the one-on-one attention anymore. It’s like when your kid was ready to ride his 2–wheel bike. Imagine that he was forced to keep the training wheels on, even though he is ready to ride faster on varied terrain — and the training wheels keep getting in the way. What once was support gets in the way of making progress. That is what was happening with my son. It wasn’t the right environment for him anymore. He had progressed beyond the point where those specialized tools were helpful, and they became unnecessary crutches impeding his development and growing independence. More concerning, he started to pick up the disruptive behaviors of his peers in the class for whom that environment was still necessary. He started to backslide, to regress.

What he needed was to be surrounded by typically developing peers, in a general education classroom. He needed the educational challenge of grade-level work. He needed an environment where he had to practice the basic discipline required to function in a typical classroom. He needed to have proper social behavior modeled to him not by a therapist in a clean, clinical environment, but on the school yard by his friends. He needed to ditch the training wheels. Don’t get me wrong, he still needs support and help, which is where his special education team comes in — but they help him to work within and adapt to the environment, they don’t customize the environment to suite him.

There are some people who would consider my child a nuisance in the classroom — a disruptive influence that hurts the educational experience of other kids. He makes them “uncomfortable.” Some people — like DeVos and Jeff Sessions — feel that removing children like mine from a general education classroom is the answer to many problems in our public schools. I’m not blind or delusional. I’ve seen how my child can disrupt a classroom. I get it. For so many people, the answer seems simple — just get rid of the kids.

Forget about the injustice — and insult — that presents to my son, me, and all those affected by ASD for a moment. I think they miss a larger point and learning opportunity. We would be depriving those “normal” kids of essential life skill development opportunities. Schools are supposed to prepare our kids for the real world. The real world does not include “specialized” rooms for autistic people vs “normal” people, special lines at Starbucks, special cars on trains. We’re all in the mix together. Inevitably, if one is out and active in the world, one will meet someone who is different. Having had a classmate, a friend, who is different in childhood instills a sense of empathy, understanding, and tolerance desperately needed in this world. And not for nothing, but some of the most poignant, beautiful moments in our lives have involved the unexpected kindness and tolerance shown to my son by his typical peers at school.

This whole bill is poised as enabling “choice.” The truth is that if this bill goes through, I might not have a “choice” about where my son goes to school. If the funding dries up to provide my son the support he gets at his local public school, and if there is no longer a legal requirement that he be educated at a public school, then I would have no choice but to find a “specialized” environment for him, even though I’ve been down that road before and I know that it’s not right for him.

I have friends who have made the choice to send their kids to a specialized school, because it was the right choice for their kid. They are struggling financially to pay for it, but they make the sacrifice. Specialized private schools for kids like mine can cost $25,000 per year, sometimes more. Voucher amounts, under this bill, would vary widely from state to state, depending on whether or not the state chose to make their funds available as part of the voucher pool, in addition to the federal block grants. But for the sake of argument, lets assume that the voucher amounts would be similar to the most generous ones currently available today, about $11,000. It wouldn’t even cover half the cost. I can’t help but wonder what happens to the people who can’t afford to make up the difference. What happens to those families? What happens to those kids?

I don’t know what will happen with HR 610. I hope and pray that it is defeated. I hope that people will read this and maybe have a change of heart, and realize that “school choice” doesn’t leave people like me or my son with much of one.